A eulogy for the UK Donation Ethics Committee

Most people I know want to donate their organs after they die. Why wouldn’t they? If you have to die, you might as well do your best to save several other lives once you’re gone. But organ donation is a more ethically complex topic than many people realise. From Spring 2014 until April this year I was a member of the UK Donation Ethics Committee (UKDEC), which advised NHS Blood and Transplant and the various UK health departments on the ethics of organ donation and transplantation. The committee included doctors, lawyers, nurses, ethicists like me, and ‘lay’ members – ordinary members of the public. In my JME article, I discuss the committee’s work and why it came to an end.

UKDEC dealt with a wide variety of topics. We advised the Welsh Government on the ethical implications of a switch to ‘deemed consent’ to organ donation in Wales, undertook an analysis of the role of the family in donation, and engaged with ethnic minorities and religious groups to facilitate discourse about donation. Most of all, our work was important because we provided practical ethical guidance to healthcare professionals who were often unsure about the ethics and sometimes the legality of new developments in organ donation. Every year new technologies emerge that can enable donation where it was previously impossible, or which can improve the viability of donated organs. Sometimes doctors would approach UKDEC for our advice on their protocols that wished to make use of these new innovations.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by these authors and blogs are theirs and do not necessarily represent that of the Bioethics Research Library and Kennedy Institute of Ethics or Georgetown University.